THIRTY-SIX.
The shutting of the french windows had made the room stuffy and the turning of the venetian blinds had made it dim. There was an acrid smell on the air and there was too heavy a silence. It was not more than sixteen feet from the door to the couch and I didn"t need more than half of that to know a dead man lay on that couch.
He was on his side with his face to the back of the couch, one arm crooked under him and the forearm of the other lying almost across his eyes. Between his chest and the back of the couch there was a pool of blood and in that pool lay the Webley Hammerless. The side of his face was a smeared mask.
I bent over him, peering at the edge of the wide open eye, the bare and gaudy arm, at the inner curve of which I could see the puffed and blackened hole in his head from which the blood oozed still.
I left him like that. His wrist was warm but there was no doubt he was quite dead. I looked around for some kind of note or scribble. There was nothing but the pile of script on the desk. They don"t always leave notes. The typewriter was uncovered on its stand. There was nothing in that. Otherwise everything looked natural enough. Suicides prepare themselves in all sorts of ways, some with liquor, some with elaborate champagne dinners. Some in evening clothes, some in no clothes. People have killed themselves on the tops of walls, in ditches, in bathrooms, in the water, over the water, on the water. They have hanged themselves in bars and ga.s.sed themselves in garages. This one looked simple. I hadn"t heard the shot but it must have gone off when I was down by the lake watching the surfboard rider make his turn. There was plenty of noise. Why that should have mattered to Roger Wade I didn"t know. Perhaps it hadn"t. The final impulse had coincided with the run of the speedboat. I didn"t like it, but n.o.body cared what I liked.
The torn pieces of the check were still on the floor but I left them. The torn strips of that stuff he had written that other night were in the wastebasket. These I did not leave. I picked them out and made sure I had them all and stuffed them into my pocket. The basket was almost empty, which made it easy. No use wondering where the gun had been. There were too many places to hide it in. It could have been in a chair or in the couch, under one of the cushions. It could have been on the floor, behind the books, anywhere.
I went out and shut the door. I listened. From the kitchen, sounds. I went out there. Eileen had a blue ap.r.o.n on and the kettle was just beginning to whistle. She turned the flame down and gave me a brief impersonal glance.
"How do you like your tea, Mr. Marlowe?"
"Just out of the pot as it comes."
I leaned against the wall and got a cigarette out just to have something to do with my fingers. I pinched and squeezed it and broke it in half and threw one half on the floor. Her eyes followed it down. I bent and picked it up. I squeezed the two halves together into a little ball.
She made the tea. "I always take cream and sugar," she said over her shoulder. "Strange, when I drink my coffee black. I learned tea drinking in England. They were using saccharin instead of sugar. When the war came they had no cream, of course."
"You lived in England?"
"I worked there. I stayed all through the Blitz. I met a man-but I told you about that."
"Where did you meet Roger?"
"In New York."
"Married there?"
She swung around, frowning. "No, we were not married in New York. Why?"
"Just talking while the tea draws."
She looked out of the window over the sink. She could see down to the lake from there. She leaned against the edge of the drainboard and her fingers fiddled with a folded tea towel.
"It has to be stopped," she said, "and I don"t know how. Perhaps he"ll have to be committed to an inst.i.tution. Somehow I can"t quite see myself doing that. I"d have to sign something, wouldn"t I?"
She turned around when she asked that.
"He could do it himself," I said. "That is, he could have up to now."
The tea timer rang its bell. She turned back to the sink and poured the tea from one pot into another. Then she put the fresh pot on the tray she had already fixed up with cups. I went over and got the tray and carried it to the table between the two davenports in the living room. She sat down opposite me and poured two cups. I reached for mine and set it down in front of me for it to cool. I watched her fix hers with two lumps of sugar and the cream. She tasted it.
"What did you mean by that last remark?" she asked suddenly. "That he could have up to now-committed himself to some inst.i.tution, you meant, didn"t you?"
"I guess it was a wild pitch. Did you hide the gun I told you about? You know, the morning after he made that play upstairs."
"Hide it?" she repeated frowning. "No. I never do anything like that. I don"t believe in it. Why are you asking?"
"And you forgot your house keys today?"
"I told you I did."
"But not the garage key. Usually in this kind of house the outside keys are mastered."
"I don"t need a key for the garage," she said sharply. "It opens by a switch. There"s a relay switch inside the front door you push up as you go out. Then another switch beside the garage operates that door. Often we leave the garage open. Or Candy goes out and closes it."
"I see."
"You are making some rather strange remarks," she said with acid in her voice. "You did the other morning."
"I"ve had some rather strange experiences in this house. Guns going off in the night, drunks lying out on the front lawn and doctors coming that won"t do anything. Lovely women wrapping their arms around me and talking as if they thought I was someone else, Mexican houseboys throwing knives. It"s a pity about that gun. But you don"t really love your husband, do you? I guess I said that before too."
She stood up slowly. She was as calm as a custard, but her violet eyes didn"t seem quite the same color, nor of quite the same softness. Then her mouth began to tremble.
"Is-is something wrong in there?" she asked very slowly, and looked towards the study.
I barely had time to nod before she was running. She was at the door in a flash. She threw it open and darted in. If I expected a wild scream I was fooled. I didn"t hear anything. I felt lousy. I ought to have kept her out and eased into that corny routine about bad news, prepare yourself, won"t you sit down, I"m afraid something rather serious has happened. Blah, blah, blah. And when you have worked your way through it you haven"t saved anybody a thing. Often enough you have made it worse.
I got up and followed her into the study. She was kneeling beside the couch with his head pulled against her breast, smearing herself with his blood. She wasn"t making a sound of any kind. Her eyes were shut. She was rocking back and forth on her knees as far as she could, holding him tight.
I went back and found a telephone and a book. I called the sheriffs substation that seemed to be nearest. Didn"t matter, they"d relay it by radio in any case. Then I went out to the kitchen and turned the water on and fed the strips of yellow paper from my pocket down the electric garbage grinder. I dumped the tea leaves from the other pot after it. In a matter of seconds the stuff was gone. I shut off the water and switched off the motor. I went back to the living room and opened the front door and stepped outside.
There must have been a deputy cruising close by because he was there in about six minutes. When I took him into the study she was still kneeling by the couch. He went over to her at once.
"I"m sorry, ma"am. I understand how you must feel, but you shouldn"t be touching anything."
She turned her head, then scrambled to her feet. "It"s my husband. He"s been shot."
He took his cap off and put it on the desk. He reached for the telephone.
"His name is Roger Wade," she said in a high brittle voice. "He"s the famous novelist."
"I know who he is, ma"am," the deputy said, and dialed.
She looked down at the front of her blouse. "May I go upstairs and change this?"
"Sure." He nodded to her and spoke into the phone, then hung up and turned. "You say he"s been shot. That mean somebody else shot him?"
"I think this man murdered him," she said without looking at me, and went quickly out of the room.
The deputy looked at me. He got a notebook out. He wrote something in it. "I better have your name," he said casually, "and address. You the one called in?"
"Yes." I told him my name and address.
"Just take it easy until Lieutenant Ohls gets here."
"Bernie Ohls?"
"Yeah. You know him?"
"Sure. I"ve known him a long time. He used to work out of the D.A."s office."
"Not lately," the deputy said. "He"s a.s.sistant Chief of Homicide, working out of the L.A. Sheriff"s office. You a friend of the family, Mr. Marlowe?"
"Mrs. Wade didn"t make it sound that way."
He shrugged and half smiled. "Just take it easy, Mr. Marlowe. Not carrying a gun, are you?"
"Not today."
"I better make sure." He did. He looked towards the couch then. "In spots like this you can"t expect the wife to make much sense. We better wait outside."
THIRTY-SEVEN.
Ohls was a medium-sized thick man with short-cropped faded blond hair and faded blue eyes. He had stiff white eyebrows and in the days before he stopped wearing a hat you were always a little surprised when he took it off-there was so much more head than you expected. He was a hard tough cop with a grim outlook on life but a very decent guy underneath. He ought to have made captain years ago. He had pa.s.sed the examination among the top three half a dozen times. But the Sheriff didn"t like him and he didn"t like the Sheriff.
He came down the stairs rubbing the side of his jaw. Flash bulbs had been going off in the study for a long time. Men had gone in and out. I had just sat in the living room with a plainclothes d.i.c.k and waited.
Ohls sat down on the edge of a chair and dangled his hands. He was chewing on an unlit cigarette. He looked at me broodingly.
"Remember the old days when they had a gatehouse and a private police force in Idle Valley?"
I nodded. "And gambling also."
"Sure. You can"t stop it. This whole valley is still private property. Like Arrowhead used to be, and Emerald Bay. Long time since I was on a case with no reporters jumping around. Somebody must have whispered in Sheriff Petersen"s ear. They kept it off the teletype."
"Real considerate of them," I said. "How is Mrs. Wade?"
"Too relaxed. She must of grabbed some pills. There"s a dozen kinds up there-even Demerol. That"s bad stuff. Your friends don"t have a lot of luck lately, do they? They get dead."
I didn"t have anything to say to that.
"Gunshot suicides always interest me," Ohls said loosely. "So easy to fake. The wife says you killed him. Why would she say that?"
"She doesn"t mean it literally."
"n.o.body else was here. She says you knew where the gun was, knew he was getting drunk, knew he had fired off the gun the other night when she had to fight with him to get the gun away from him. You were there that night too. Don"t seem to help much, do you?"
"I searched his desk this afternoon. No gun. I"d told her where it was and to put it away. She says now she didn"t believe in that sort of thing."
"Just when would "now" be?" Ohls asked gruffly.
"After she came home and before I phoned the substation."
"You searched the desk. Why?" Ohls lifted his hands and put them on his knees. He was looking at me indifferently, as if he didn"t care what I said.
"He was getting drunk. I thought it just as well to have the gun somewhere else. But he didn"t try to kill himself the other night. It was just show-off."
Ohls nodded. He took the chewed cigarette out of his mouth, dropped it into a tray, and put a fresh one in place of it.
"I quit smoking," he said. "Got me coughing too much. But the G.o.ddam things still ride me. Can"t feel right without one in my mouth. You supposed to watch the guy when he"s alone?"
"Certainly not. He asked me to come out and have lunch. We talked and he was kind of depressed about his writing not going well. He decided to hit the bottle. Think I should have taken it away from him?"
"I"m not thinking yet. I"m just trying to get a picture. How much drinking did you do?"
"Beer."
"It"s your tough luck you were here, Marlowe. What was the check for? The one he wrote and signed and tore up?"
"They all wanted me to come and live here and keep him in line. All means himself, his wife, and his publisher, a man named Howard Spencer. He"s in New York, I guess. You can check with him. I turned it down. Afterwards she came to me and said her husband was off on a toot and she was worried and would I find him and bring him home. I did that. Next thing I knew I was carrying him in off his front lawn and putting him to bed. I didn"t want any part of it, Bernie. It just kind of grew up around me."
"Nothing to do with the Lennox case, huh?"
"Aw, for Pete"s sake. There isn"t any Lennox case."
"How true," Ohls said dryly. He squeezed his kneecaps. A man came in at the front door and spoke to the other d.i.c.k. Then came across to Ohls.
"There"s a Dr. Loring outside, Lieutenant. Says he was called. He"s the lady"s doctor."
"Let him in."
The d.i.c.k went back and Dr. Loring came in with his neat black bag. He was cool and elegant in a tropical worsted suit. He went past me without looking at me.
"Upstairs?" he asked Ohls.
"Yeah-in her room." Ohls stood up. "What you give her that Demerol for, Doc?"
Dr. Loring frowned at him. "I prescribe for my patient as I think proper," he said coldly. "I am not required to explain why. Who says I gave Mrs. Wade Demerol?"
"I do. The bottle"s up there with your name on it. She"s got a regular drugstore in her bathroom. Maybe you don"t know it, Doc, but we have a pretty complete exhibit of the little pills downtown. Bluejays, redbirds, yellow jackets, goofb.a.l.l.s, and all the rest of the list. Demerol"s about the worst of the lot. That"s the stuff Goering lived on, I heard somewhere. Took eighteen a day when they caught him. Took the army doctors three months to cut him down."
"I don"t know what those words mean," Dr. Loring said frigidly.
"You don"t ? Pity. Bluejays are sodium amytal. Redbirds are Seconal. Yellow jackets are Nembutal. Goofb.a.l.l.s are one of the barbiturates laced with Benzedrine. Demerol is a synthetic narcotic that is very habit forming. You just hand "em out, huh? Is the lady suffering from something serious?"